Amanda's Log: Spanish and Ancient Greek

[Rumcajs]

I think I’ll try this; I’ve heard several people recommend FSI for the grammar drills. Does it cover more advanced grammar topics like the subjunctive as well?

Yes, it does. Currently I'm at unit 37 (out of 55) and the subjunctive is discussed there (and in some previous units as well). I find those drills very helpful.

[philomath]

Yes, it does. Currently I'm at unit 37 (out of 55) and the subjunctive is discussed there (and in some previous units as well). I find those drills very helpful.

Great, I’m looking forward to trying it. I really need to improve my grammar when I speak. Today as I was leaving Spain I tried speaking to the man who drove me to the airport, but I made all sorts of silly mistakes: confusing fui and fue, ser and estar, por and para... it was frustrating because these are very simple things, which I don’t usually get wrong when speaking by myself (at a slower pace) or writing. I hope the FSI grammar drills will help me speak more accurately and automatically.

While it’s frustrating not being able to speak well, I like to remind myself that I’m making progress: it took me around nine years of studying Spanish off and on to get the courage to talk to native speakers, but I finally did it. Overcoming this fear in December made a big difference in my language learning, and I think it’ll really help me with the next language I start. (Okay, not the next: I won’t be speaking Ancient Greek to anyone. But after that!) So I tell myself that I’m making progress, even if it feels a little slow.

[philomath]

I'm back from Spain! I have a few small updates about Spanish, and then the rest of this post will be about my plan for Ancient Greek.

Spanish
In order to complete my goals for the month (listed in my first post), I have to practice speaking for ~2 more hours, study grammar for ~2.5 more hours, learn 15 new words, read 408 more pages (!), and write 2,770 more words. I'll be spending the rest of this week working on that (though I doubt I'll be able to finish the reading).

Some changes to my Spanish routine:
- I'm going to start one of the FSI Spanish courses this week. (I'm not sure if I should try the Basic course or the Programmatic Course, so I'll take a look at both.)
- I realized I've been using Anki too much. I was adding hundreds of new cards to Anki at a time, and it was taking me too long to review all of them. From now on, I'm just going to keep vocabulary lists in my notebook and review them from time to time. Maybe I'll pick a few important or interesting words and add them to Anki, but that's it.

Ancient Greek
Spanish is still my focus, but I've been wanting to learn Ancient Greek for a long time, and I decided to do a year-long project to learn Homeric Greek. So here's a bit of an outline of the project:

Goal: Learn enough Ancient Greek (specifically the Homeric dialect) to be able to read the Iliad and the Odyssey. (I won’t be able to finish reading them during this project, but I’d like to learn enough grammar and vocabulary to at least read the first few books of the Iliad.)

Study period: June 2018–June 2019

Main resource: Homeric Greek: A Book for Beginners by Clyde Pharr
- Contains: An introduction about the alphabet, 55 chapters on grammar, 22 chapters with just text from the Iliad, and 50-something pages at the end of the book about Attic Greek

Other resources:
- A translation of the Iliad by Robert Fagles and another one by Robert Fitzgerald
- A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect by Richard John Cunliffe
- I also need to find an (annotated?) copy of the Iliad in Ancient Greek.

Study plan:
- June 2018: Begin by learning about the alphabet and phonology of Homeric Greek (although I’m not going to worry too much about pronunciation!). Do lessons 3 and 4 in Homeric Greek: A Book for Beginners.
- July 2018: Do lessons 5–12. Get a copy of A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect.
- August–December 2018: Do lessons 13–55. (This is ~9 lessons per month, so around ~2 lessons per week.)
- January–April 2019: Do lessons 56-77. (This is 5.5 lessons per month, so ~1 lesson per week. I’ll be taking classes during this time, so I’ll be busy with actual schoolwork.) Once I finish this part, I’ll be done with my textbook and I’ll have read all of the Iliad Book I.
- May–June 2019: Continue reading the Iliad. I’ll have to start reading Book II and see how long it takes me. I’ve heard people say that Homer reuses a lot of vocabulary words, and that once you’ve learned most of them you can read the Iliad relatively quickly. But I’m not sure if I believe that, and either way I won’t be able to read the whole Iliad in two months. I’ll have to leave finishing the Iliad, reading the Odyssey, and studying other dialects of Ancient Greek for another project, because in July 2019 I plan to start Mandarin Chinese.

Edited for a typo.

[philomath]

Recently I learned about the Dialang diagnostic tests. Today I decided to take the listening and writing tests for Spanish. (I was planning to take all of them, but then I got tired of test-taking.) I got a score of A2 in listening and B1 in writing. I think this is fair, but I was still disappointed to only get a result of A2 in listening.

Dialang's writing test surprised me because it seemed to focus on formal writing. Ever since I stopped taking Spanish classes five years ago, I haven't thought about developing my formal writing skills. It occurred to me that I don't know how to write a formal letter in Spanish, and I definitely wouldn't be able to write a job description, resume, or anything professional like that. I suppose this isn't an immediate concern, but I'd like to be able to do those things eventually. I just wonder what sort of resource would help me with that. Some kind of advanced textbook?

On a different note, I think I need to diversify my listening and reading practice. Right now, I primarily watch TV shows in Spanish on Netflix and read El tiempo entre costuras. I do think I learn grammar and vocabulary from them, but I also think I need input from more "real world" sources, to learn vocabulary that is more relevant to my daily life. I used to enjoy Martha Debayle's podcasts and the podcast Nómadas, so I think I'll try those again. I also want to start reading El País or another source of news in Spanish.

Oh, and today I read some chapters from my grammar book about the subjunctive. (I use Intermediate Spanish: A Grammar and Workbook, and when something is unclear I check Routledge's Spanish: An Essential Grammar as well.) I had been putting this off, but it was very helpful! I kept coming across sentences during my reading and not understanding why they were in the subjunctive. For example, aunque + subjunctive or para que + subjunctive. Now it all makes sense! Of course, I'll have to make this knowledge more concrete by finding more examples when I read. I'll also write some example sentences and get them corrected on iTalki. I've been doing a lot of that lately.

[Dak]

Good luck on your studies, we seem to be at a similar point in our language learning (albeit for me it's Korean and now starting German ) I plan to work on Mandarin next as well.

[philomath]

Review of May

Spanish
- Did 9 hours, 10 min of listening practice.
- Did 3 hours, 50 min of speaking practice. 2 hours were during iTalki lessons and the rest of the time was by myself.
- Reviewed grammar for 3 hours, 40 min. Specifically, I reviewed expressions of time, object pronouns, and uses of the preterite, imperfect, and subjunctive.
- Learned 643 new words.
- Read 256 pages of El tiempo entre costuras.
- Wrote 2,940 words. I posted most of them on iTalki for corrections.

Goals for June

Spanish
- Do 15 hours of listening practice. Use Spanish subtitles less often.
- Do 5 hours of speaking practice (iTalki lessons or speaking by myself). In addition, do FSI Basic Spanish Units 1-30. (I’ve never done any FSI courses before so I have no idea if this is a realistic goal or not.)
- Review grammar for 5 hours.
- Learn 300 new words. (This is a lower goal than last month’s because I want to make sure I learn how to use the words instead of just memorizing their definitions.)
- Read 450 pages. (I plan to finish reading El tiempo entre costuras and also start reading news articles from El País.)
- Write 4,500 words.

Ancient Greek
- Do Lessons 1-4 in Homeric Greek: A Book for Beginners.
- I might end up doing more because Lessons 1-3 are very introductory and just discuss pronunciation and syntax.

[philomath]

Hello again!

I didn’t study Spanish or Ancient Greek at all during the first week of June because something came up. Now I’m not feeling as motivated as I did last month, but I’m trying to get back into studying again.

I do have some updates though:

Spanish

Listening: I’m still looking for some more podcasts to listen to, but I’m no longer letting myself use Spanish subtitles when I watch TV. I just end up reading the subtitles instead of listening. Recently I watched the movie Coco in Spanish, and then I started watching La casa de papel from the beginning, this time without subtitles.

Speaking: I didn’t really like FSI Spanish unfortunately… it just seemed a little bit tedious. I really like Pimsleur though, and I have access to Pimsleur Spanish through my library, so I might start doing that. I did some Pimsleur in the past and remember feeling like it helped me with my pronunciation. As for improving my grammar when I speak, I think I’ll just do more speaking practice and review the conjugations some more.

It’s been hard to do speaking practice lately. The problem is that I don’t really like doing conversation exchanges on iTalki; we tend to just make small talk and that gets very boring very fast. I’ve also had trouble finding a good tutor. I think what I need is to make a Spanish-speaking friend who I can have interesting conversations with, just as I would with an English-speaking friend, but that’s easier said than done. When I move back to Boston in a month I may try to join a Spanish conversation group.

In the meantime, I’ve been trying to do speaking practice by myself. I just need to think of things to speak about. I think I’m able to hear most of the mistakes I make, so that’s very good. When I’m not sure how to say something, I write it down and post it on iTalki so someone can correct me.

I also found out about Boris Shekhtman's "islands" method recently. I want to read more about it because it sounds like it could really help me improve my speaking.

Vocabulary: I got tired of Anki and deleted all 2000-something Spanish cards that I had made. I think I made the mistake of learning too many new cards per day and not scrapping the boring ones. I was also making flashcards for individual words instead of using them in sentences. Instead of using Anki, I’ve been making vocabulary lists in my notebook and reviewing them once in a while. I would like to continue using Anki someday, but I’ll have to rethink how to use it.

Ancient Greek

I’ve started Ancient Greek! So far I’ve done Lesson 1 in my textbook and part of Lesson 2, which discuss the alphabet, breathing marks, stress, etc. I'm looking forward to starting the real grammar lessons.

[philomath]

I have a few short updates for today:

Spanish

I really, really need to expand my vocabulary. It's hard to do speaking practice when I constantly need to stop to look up words I don't know or to talk around them. To solve this problem, I've decided to 1) make lots of vocabulary lists in my notebook and review them whenever I can, and 2) start writing more often on different topics. I found a list of daily journal prompts and have started working through them, starting with the one for January 1st, which was about New Year's Resolutions. First, I read an article in Spanish about setting New Year's Resolutions and made a list of the words I didn't know. Then I wrote 500 words or so on the topic, and afterward I posted what I wrote on iTalki for corrections.

In addition, I have a language partner on iTalki, and we're going to pick topics to write about from this list and then correct each other's writing.

I think it's very important that I get my writing corrected. Otherwise, how will I know when I'm using a word or phrase incorrectly? Yesterday I looked up how to say "to join a gym" and SpanishDict.com gave me "apuntarse al gimnasio". When I used that phrase in my writing, someone on iTalki corrected it to "apuntarse en un gimnasio". Since I plan to write a lot, maybe I need to find an iTalki tutor who would be willing to correct everything.

Ancient Greek

I love Ancient Greek so far. Yesterday I finished Lesson 2 in my textbook. The alphabet doesn't pose any problem, but I'm not so sure about the pitch accent... My textbook tells me that I should attempt to learn it because pronouncing the changes in pitch correctly will help me read the poems. However, I might take the easy route for now and treat the pitch as stress.

Lesson 3 is where the textbook starts discussing noun cases and the first declension. I haven't mentioned it here, but I self-studied Latin for four or five years, several years ago. I never reached a very high level in it, but I'm certainly no stranger to noun cases, so I'm not worried about learning them in Ancient Greek. I'm really looking forward to getting started learning the grammar.

[philomath]

There's a new post on this forum about experiencing burnout, and it made me start thinking about my Spanish studies. I'm afraid that I'm getting a little bit burnt out. I know the reason for this: I've been putting too much pressure on myself to practice speaking. I feel like I need to work on my speaking skills because that's what you're "supposed to do" when you study a language, and besides, I'd like to be able to speak well when the opportunity arises in real life. But the fact is that I don't like speaking in Spanish just for the sake of improving my speaking skills, which means that conversation exchanges and tutoring sessions aren't very enjoyable. I think an in-person language exchange might be more interesting, but I haven't found one yet. Meanwhile, the language partner that I mentioned in my last post has disappeared completely... I guess she changed her mind about wanting to do that writing practice.

So I think I'm going to forget about my speaking goals for this month and let myself focus on activities that I like to do in Spanish: watching TV, reading, and studying vocabulary, mostly. I've also been doing more writing lately and enjoying it more than I used to.

My Ancient Greek studies are on track (based on the schedule I made). Last night I sat down and memorized the declension of βουλή (will, plan, counsel). Now it's time to learn my first 15 or so words. I'm still not sure what to do about the pitch accent, but I'm trying not to worry about it.

[jeff_lindqvist]

I also found out about Boris Shekhtman's "islands" method recently. I want to read more about it because it sounds like it could really help me improve my speaking.

Have you seen any of these?

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/08/trav ... ssian.html
http://www.learnetarium.com/2010/08/nov ... uages.html
http://www.learnetarium.com/2011/01/spe ... guage.html
https://www.linguacore.com/polyglotdrea ... e-islands/

Then there's Boris Shekhtman's book "How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately" (review here).